The management of large complex projects, such as, for example, defense projects, is difficult. One difficulty is that as problems (anomalies) arise, the people who have the problem often do not pass the problem along to management. Sometimes this failure to report issues is deliberate and in other cases the issue(s) involved may not be recognized as a serious problem by those who are aware of them. For them, it is just one more item that must be attended to among a number of other items. Thus, it often happens that by the time tipper management becomes aware of an issue, it has become serious and sometimes project-threatening. In many instances, particularly with government-funded projects, the political process interferes (e.g., to cut off project funding) shortly after upper management becomes aware of the problem and long before remedial action can be taken. Human nature works against early solutions since workers have an incentive to not let anybody know about the problem at first; because they feel it's their job to solve the problem. Generally what happens is that a few weeks into working the issue, it becomes more and more worrisome to the primary project workers and as time goes on they become even more committed to not ‘fessing up.’ At some point, the project manager at a high level finds out about the problem, often just a few days before Congress or the funding agency finds out. Attempts to train employees to report problems have largely failed, because such directives directly contradict employee intuition.
In many regards, commercial brand management and corporate management organizations operate in a similar mode such that problems percolate at low levels in an organization and only become visible to upper management when they become serious, often threatening the viability of the product or corporation.